Publishing

Twilight of Lanar’ya is now on sale in paperback (CreateSpace and Amazon) and eBook (Smashwords and Amazon).

So, having finished my first publishable novel and decided to self-publish, everything should have been simple. I just upload the files, find someone to do the cover and the maps, and then push a button and it’s all done, right? Right?

Ha. I wish.

Finding a cover artist was simple. I talked with my friend Daniel and he recommended Keary Taylor. I checked her out, liked what I saw, and contacted her. We went through a few rounds before we had a cover that was awesome.

I spoke with several people about maps and finally got my friend John-Paul Gorgoroso to tackle that issue. Once I had the maps in hand, it was time to upload.

And it was time to start playing the “Will It Work” drinking game.

Uploading to CreateSpace was simple. I selected the file, uploaded it, did the interior check, uploaded the cover, and ordered a proof. I did wind up having to make some formatting revisions to the first proof but the second came out perfect. It helped tremendously that CreateSpace provided a pre-formatted document. All I had to do was copy my text in to it, keep the formatting from the CreateSpace document, fix a few things here and there, and then, voilà, I was done.

Uploading to Smashwords, on the other hand, was not so simple. First I had to read their guide. I opted to read the HTML version in my browser so I could bookmark and browse between sections as needed. However, most of their anchors didn’t actually go anywhere. Then, even after I had meticulously followed all of the steps, their MeatGrinder still couldn’t handle having a first paragraph intent at the start of each chapter and it kept throwing my dividers out of alignment. After a few hours of growling, cursing, and wishing the MeatGrinder could at least tell me which friggin’ page the problem was on, I managed to get a workable draft uploaded and ran a quick check on it.

Then I had to repeat the process for Amazon Kindle since Amazon doesn’t automatically accept the requests from Smashwords.

By the time I had waged and won (barely) the formatting war, my head was spinning and I was wondering just why I had thought this would be a good idea to begin with.

Stay tuned for Part IV: Planning a Marketing Campaign!

Twilight of Lanar’ya is now on sale in paperback (CreateSpace and Amazon) and eBook (Smashwords and Amazon).

Twilight of Lanar’ya is now on sale in paperback (CreateSpace and Amazon) and eBook (Smashwords and Amazon).

Finishing Twilight of Lanar’ya took me about three months total from start to completion. So, by August 2011, I had a fairly final draft ready. I just needed to fine tune a few areas of it and then I’d be ready to publish. So, I did what all writers who don’t know better do.

I started looking for an agent. (Even Neil Gaiman thinks it’s a bit of a waste of time).

If I knew then what I know now, I’d have saved myself the hassle and published a hell of a lot sooner. But, I was hung up on going the traditional route. I felt confident in my work and knew that the market had matured a good bit. I felt that I was easily better than some of the junk filling up bookshelves (Twilight, anyone?) and that I was on par with other big author’s earliest works. Certainly my writing had benefited from reading a lot. I don’t have the hubris to say I’m as good as Terry Goodkind or Terry Brooks but I do think I’m at least as good as some of the early stuff from Dragonlance (back when the world of Krynn was still being formed and the authors kept writing themselves into corners).

I sent Twilight of Lanar’ya to about fifty different agents. I heard back from about half of them. Mostly rejections, of course, because publishers are iffy about taking on new talent with it being so easy to self-publish and to distribute online. Plenty of bookstores and closing up shop for lack of customers and inability to compete against Amazon. Almost all the rejections I had acknowledged that my book was 1) well-written, 2) interesting, and 3) had potential but it’s gotten damned hard to sell a trilogy from a new name and, as I said, publishers are becoming very risk averse.

I did hear back a couple of tentative offers but nothing that I really liked on follow-up. Basically, if I was going to have to do all the marketing and negotiate the deals with bookstores myself and the publisher was just going to print a run and then charge me for it, why not just self-publish instead? At least with a print-on-demand service, I don’t have to worry about a publishing house playing games with the numbers until I have to take them to court to get my royalties the way Peter Jackson had to take New Line to court to get paid for The Fellowship of the Ring (which, according to Movie Industry Magic Math, did rather poorly). Perhaps big publishing houses don’t do this, but then, if I’m going to be doing all the footwork myself with no help, why should I get substantially less money than I would if I went indie?

So, I started looking into self-publishing.

My friend and fellow author, Daniel A. Kaine, had self-published his book, Daeva: Dawn of Darkness and so I went to him for advice. He gave me a few pointers and so off I went.

Now, lest anyone think self-publishing is easy, let me be blunt and say it’s not. Self-publishing is definitely not for the faint of heart. Self-publishing requires that you be your own editor, your own proofreader, your own marketing department, and your own format specialist. It requires that you study the market and the trends and that you set your prices according to what the cost of print-on-demand for your work is and how much of a royalty you need. A few people have gotten fantastically wealthy from self-publishing but, for the most part, the vast majority of us will not be able to quit our day jobs.

So, having decided to self-publish, I had climbed one mountain only to find a whole range of the things in front of me…

Check back in a few days for Part III of this saga — Why Formatting Is The Bane Of My Existence.

Twilight of Lanar’ya is now on sale in paperback (CreateSpace and Amazon) and eBook (Smashwords and Amazon).

Twilight of Lanar’ya is now on sale in paperback (CreateSpace and Amazon) and eBook (Smashwords and Amazon).

My adventure in getting published started many years ago when I was in college. I had written my first novel Prophecies of Atlantis and, having won a few awards for my short stories, figured that getting published would be a cinch. After all, I knew I could write well — I had some shiny awards to show for it and several of my professors telling me that I was a good writer. So, full of confidence in a way only a twenty-year-old can be, I sent my query letters and copies of Prophecies off, figuring I’d have a contract and be set for life.

Instead, I started up a rather impressive collection of rejection letters.

These were the days before Peter Jackson brought fantasy more into the mainstream with his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy. This was long before J.K. Rowling made it acceptable for parents to let their children read books about magic and wizards. This was back when Dragonlance was still something of a cult community and WoTers were considered eccentric.

So, I got rejected. A lot.

Looking back now, Prophecies deserved to get rejected. It was a good long story for someone who hadn’t seen the better part of life. But, the characters were very juvenile, the plot was rather bland, and my ambitions had far out-paced my skill or discipline at that point in my life. Still, getting rejected isn’t easy and, in those days (and even today) no one really bothers to tell you why.

So, I sucked it up and focused more on writing D&D campaigns, designing NWN levels and campaigns, attempting to write a MUD, and then just doing walk-throughs and guides for various Final Fantasy games.

I started working on a recurrent project around this time as well. Heart’s Flame was popular on various message boards I hung out at but then, I’m afraid it was probably something of the echo-chamber effect. In time, I moved to France, got married, found a job, and quit writing Heart’s Flame. I was focused on advancing my “real” career and just figured that, hey, I could do some short stories and all but I’d never get published by the majors. Fantasy fiction was just too “out there” and I had no good ideas for general fiction titles.

In 2007, I started writing a short fanfic set in World of Warcraft about my characters. Alayne’s Story got me a good bit of attention within the WoW EU community and I had a lot of positive feedback. I wound up starting a website for it over at www.magisters-terrace.com and even got the idea for a book called The Unexiled. However, juggling work, Alayne’s Story, and The Unexiled meant that one of the three was going to lose out. I had (at the time) a fairly sizeable fanbase for Alayne’s Story. Also, the more I worked on The Unexiled, the more I saw I needed to do background work on the universe it was set in. That led to a project I’m still tinkering with but am nowhere near ready to announce.

The years passed by. Then, in May 2011, I had a solid kick to the rear that got me to finally write something I could publish. See, in May 2011, I was told that my position at work was going the way of the dodo. I tried to find other jobs where I was but the demand for English-speakers in France is just not that high and I kept getting told “your writing skill isn’t good enough” for damned near anything I applied for.

“Not a good enough writer, eh?” I said to myself on one of many sleepless nights. I’d seen some of what passed muster for “good” in those areas and wondered if I’d entered the Twilight Zone where “good” meant “sparkly vampires who go to high school.” I’d had the idea for the Fall of the Lanarian Empire series germinating in my head for some time at that point. “Not good enough? Well, there’s more than one way to support myself. Hell with it, I’m not sleeping now anyways. Might as well get some writing done. Not good enough? Pshaw: did they read some of the utter shite out there?”

Adversity is a great motivator in my life. If you want to see me do my best, put me under pressure. The process itself may not be pretty but you’re going to get a diamond out of it. 😉

So, mildly ticked off, I fired up Word and started writing — which is always Step 1 in Getting Published.

Stop by later this week for Part II — Finish The Damned Thing Already And Find An Agent (or why you shouldn’t bother with the second part).

Twilight of Lanar’ya is now on sale in paperback (CreateSpace and Amazon) and eBook (Smashwords and Amazon).